Targeted Email Marketing ProTips #3

This is the third and final of our installments in our little mini-series on targeted email marketing. In our first post, we talked about how to convince people to sign up. In our second post, we discussed how often you could try to sell your list on something in the context of autoresponder mails. In this final post, our SEO experts going to talk about “blasts”, or one-off emails that you send out without using an autoresponder.

Some experts suggest using blasts all the time — in fact, we’ve even come across one ‘guru’ saying that you should skip the autoresponder altogether and use only blasts. We believe that’s somewhat silly; an autoresponder that sends out useful information in small amounts over a long period of time essentially takes care of the “burden of relevance” and keeps people reading your email (if it’s done right.)

In fact, if anything, it’s smart to load up 104-ish relevant, interesting weekly emails into your autoresponder up front so that anyone who signs up for your list is down for two whole years of interesting emails — and don’t put any commercial content in there. Once you’ve done this work once, you’ll never have to do it again, and you can focus your day-to-day efforts on coming up with good offers to put in your blasts.

Crafting a Blast
A blast, unless it’s some form of emergency news that you actually want all of your subscribers to know about, is almost always a commercial message of some sort. Because of that, you don’t want to be blasting all the time — you might alienate subscribers who just signed up and haven’t seen the value of your autoresponder messages yet. But every few weeks, taking the time to find a genuinely killer offer and extending it to your list is a good move.

Other than that, a good blast follows the same rules as any other sales content:

• Killer headline
• Solid hook
• Describe the Benefits
• Soften the Impact (money-back guarantee, additional bonuses, etc.)
• Make the Offer
• Followup Benefits (P.S….)

Three-article recap:
Make content to give people to convince them to sign up.
Don’t overcommercialize.
Make more content to give people to convince them to keep reading.
Blast out sales hooks and see what you catch.

There are infinities of technical details and possibilities, but that really is the essence of the process. Enjoy!